WikiLeaks

by Harding, Luke

  The Assange camp has a different take. They say Braun was acting “warmly” towards him. She was asked, they say, whether she wanted Julian to move out, but “insists that he stay … She says: ‘No it’s not a problem, he is very welcome to stay here.’”

  Donald Böstrom was at the do, but is not much help in shedding further light on events. It seems he was preoccupied with crustacea: “During the crayfish party, I mostly just sat and ate. I’m very fond of eating. There was talk about Julian moving and staying with another couple, but the general impression was that Julian would be staying with Sonja.”

  Braun shared a bed with Assange again that night, but during the course of the weekend she spoke critically of him to another friend, Petra. She told her on the Sunday “they had not had sex any more because Julian had exceeded the limits of what she felt she could accept … She didn’t feel safe … Julian had been violent and had snapped her necklace. She thought he had torn [the condom] on purpose.” Petra added that her friend had volunteered to her a lot of other off-putting information “about Julian not taking showers and not flushing the toilet”.

  The Assange camp tell it differently. They say Sonja hosted dinner for Assange that Sunday night. She spoke highly of him and again refused offers to house him elsewhere. The following day she phoned Böstrom, they claim, and joked ruefully that Assange has become “their first adopted child” because she has insisted on washing his clothes, makes sure he eats properly and she feels like his stepmother. There has been no more sexual intercourse, despite Assange’s efforts to win her round.

  Meanwhile, Weiss has been vainly trying to get back in contact with Assange: his mobile is frequently switched off. Among other things, he has been busy looking at how he might acquire Swedish residence and journalistic credentials. It is not until late on Tuesday 17 August that they meet up again. Weiss was later to give to police an account of what turned out to be an unhappy one-night stand.

  “She agreed to wait for him, and after she was finished at work, she hung around town a bit. When she hadn’t heard from him by nine, she called him and he said there was another meeting he had to go to, and that she should come to him there.” When Assange finally emerged, they agree to get the train together to Enköping, the little town 50 miles away where she lives. He asked that Katrin pay for the tickets; it was too dangerous for him to use his credit card, he said. Weiss told the police that, on the train, he admitted he slept in Braun’s bed after the crayfish party but made the unlikely claim that “Sonja only liked girls – that she was lesbian”.

  It was midnight when they at last got home to Weiss’s place. “They took off their shoes, but the relationship between them seemed to have cooled off. The passion and the excitement had disappeared … They brushed their teeth together, which seemed everyday and boring.” Assange pushed her vigorously on to the bed “to show he was a real man”, Weiss told the police, but his heart plainly wasn’t in it. Assange suddenly turned over, went to sleep, and started snoring.

  Weiss says she felt “rejected and shocked”, and stayed awake, miserably texting her friend Maria. Maria recalls being “woken by a lot of texts from Katrin that were not positive. There had been bad sex and Julian had not been nice. She said she would have to get tested because of his lengthy foreplay.” Matters improved somewhat in the course of the night. Julian woke up and had successful sex, grumbling about her insistence on a condom. He “muttered that he preferred her, rather than latex”. In the early morning, he started ordering her about, demanding she fetch water and orange juice, and then sending her out to buy breakfast. Weiss testified she didn’t much like leaving him alone in her flat. She said, “Be good,” as she went out, leaving him sprawled emperor-like and naked on the bed, holding one of his mobile phones. He answered: “I’m always bad!”

  While Weiss was at the shops purchasing breakfast, she took the opportunity to call her friend Maria. “Katrin said she was damned if she was going to buy all this stuff and just wait on him hand and foot.” But she nevertheless went home, she says, cooked him porridge, climbed back into bed, and they had another go, using a condom. “They slept again and she woke with the realisation that he was inside her. She said, “Are you wearing anything?” and he answered, “You.” She said, “You better not have HIV,” and he answered, “Of course not.” She knew it was too late, she said, as he was already inside her so she let him continue. She had never had unprotected sex before. “She said: what if she got pregnant? And he replied that Sweden was a good place to bring up a child. She looked at him, shocked.”

  According to her testimony he added, flippantly, that they could call the baby “Afghanistan”. The police report adds a strange and disturbing remark from Katrin: “He also said he often carried abortion pills but that they were actually sugar pills.” Whatever did he mean? Assange often seemed curiously proud of his prowess in paternity: he told friends during this time period that he had recently impregnated a Korean woman he met in Paris, and she was about to give birth.

  This single night he spent with Katrin is the basis of a rape charge against Assange. To have sex with a sleeping or unconscious woman is a crime, both in Sweden and in the UK. The subsequent investigation collected testimony from Weiss’s former boyfriend that she was particularly anxious to avoid the risks from unprotected sex, and never allowed it. After Assange headed back to Stockholm (she had to pay for his train ticket again), Weiss changed the stained sheets, which she thought were “disgusting”, and got a morning-after pill from a chemist. “When she spoke to her friends, she realised that she had been the victim of a crime. She went to Danderyd University Hospital and from there to Södersjukhuset (Stockholm South General Hospital) where she was tested with a so-called rape kit.”

  Katrin’s friend Hanna, one of those she said she contacted that morning, takes up the story: “She said it had not been good and she had just wanted him to leave … Assange’s personality had changed when he got home to her flat and Katrin regretted letting him stay there … What bothered her was that Assange had had unprotected sex with her while she was asleep. He had also tried again and again to have unprotected sex with her during the night. Hanna asked why Katrin hadn’t pushed him away when she knew he wasn’t wearing a condom and Katrin said she was too shocked and paralysed and didn’t really know what was happening. Hanna is sure that she didn’t just let it happen because he was famous, although it could have been significant that he was older. Hanna said that Katrin wanted Assange to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.”

  The Assange camp’s account contradicts Weiss’s version of events in at least one important respect. She describes buying the breakfast first, before the alleged rape occurred. They stated to the UK court that the breakfast shopping came not before, but “AFTER she claims that he had entered her without a condom”. But Assange does not dispute that he had condomless sex while his partner was, as he puts it, “sleepy”.

  Once back in Stockholm, having stayed out all night, Assange now had to return to the home of Sonja Braun, where he was still staying. According to Braun, to whom it seemed clear that he had spent the night with another woman, his approach to this delicate situation was unusual. “Assange suddenly took all the clothes off the lower part of his body and rubbed Sonja with his erect penis. Sonja says she thought this was strange and unpleasant behaviour. She no longer wanted Assange to live in her flat, which he ignored.”

  As a result of this alleged incident, Assange was later accused by the Swedes of “molestation”. This would translate into the UK legal canon as “indecent assault” or, as it is now known, “sexual touching”. Braun says she slept on a mattress that night, and the next night stayed with friends.

  Her friend Petra adds that on that Wednesday “although Sonja wanted Julian to leave her flat, he wouldn’t”. Braun did not seem frightened, however: “He wasn’t aggressive or dangerous, she just wanted him out.” Böstrom, meanwhile, recalls: “On the Wednesday, Sonja says, ‘I want him to leave.’ �
��Well, tell him,’ I say, and she says, ‘I have done, but he won’t.’ So I confronted him with it. ‘Sonja would like you to move out and says she has asked you.’ He’s surprised and says she hasn’t said a word to him about it. So now it’s like stereo – one channel says one thing, the other channel says another.” Assange’s version of events is completely different: “Böstrom remains in contact with Braun, who continues to insist Julian should stay with her, and speaks warmly of him.”

  Behind all the muffled prose of police testimony, some clumsily translated from Swedish, anyone can see how electric the whole situation had become. All that was needed was for someone to bring the ends of the wires into contact. If Braun and Weiss were to get together, they might start to compare notes. Sparks would fly.

  Katrin Weiss the very next day sent Sonja Braun a text message. Worried she might have caught a disease, Weiss was anxiously trying to renew contact with Assange. She says she thought Braun might know where to find him. According to Braun’s close friend Kajsa, “Sonja realised what had happened, and they met up.” According to this witness: “Sonja said the other girl decided to go to the police and report Julian for rape and that Sonja would go along as support.”

  Braun’s other friend, Petra, testified in similar terms. She said Braun rang her “and said she had met the other girl who had told her she had been raped by Julian. They had found many similarities between hers and Sonja’s experience, and Julian wanted to have sex with the other girl without a condom. Sonja said she didn’t wish to have Julian charged, she just wanted to support the other girl. Petra said that the whole story was becoming more and more confused.”

  Böstrom was startled also to receive a phone call from Braun:

  “I can hear from her voice that it’s something serious and she says, ‘It’s not true what I said [before], we did have sex.’ Then she goes on and says that the other woman – Katrin – had called her and told her that Julian had been there and had sex with her. On both occasions it was voluntary … Katrin told her that the next morning Julian continued to want to have sex with her without a condom. And she won’t, and protests, but Julian continues in spite of her protests.

  “‘OK,’ I say, quite dumbfounded at suddenly having this conversation. Sonja goes on: ‘And I must tell you that we had sex at an earlier stage at my place and to my surprise during the act, he tears the condom … He has torn the condom and continues against my wishes.”

  Böstrom adds: “I believe that Sonja is very, very credible, so I won’t discount it without speaking to Julian and confronting him with what this is all about – what the hell he thinks he’s playing at … They want Julian to take an Aids test otherwise they will report him, as they put it. They don’t want to speak to Julian themselves. So she goes off with Katrin and we speak on the phone a few times and text a bit and I call Julian a couple of times.”

  Böstrom determinedly confronted Assange: “And his reaction is one of shock. He doesn’t understand it … [He says,] ‘Katrin didn’t object at all,’ and they had a ‘nice time’ … And I’m really trying to press him here – ‘Did you take the condom off, did you rip the condom?’ He doesn’t understand any of it … So there are two stories and I can’t draw any conclusions … Julian says that he doesn’t understand, and that they just had normal sex.” Told that Katrin claims to have protested about his lack of a condom, “Julian becomes angry a number of times, saying that they just had normal sex … ‘She did not [protest] … It’s lies, lies, lies!’” Assange later assures Böstrom that he has talked to Katrin and he thinks this is all an over-reaction. “But I tell Julian that if he takes a test they won’t report him – and if he doesn’t, they will.”

  It is common ground that Assange at first refused to take an HIV test. Had he agreed, it seems unlikely that the subsequent legal dramas would have unfolded. Katrin’s younger brother says Assange had a conversation with his sister about it: “She asked Julian if he would get tested, and he said he didn’t have time.” Weiss was allegedly told that she would just have to take his word that he had no diseases. Assange’s lawyers dispute that. According to them, he said: “I can do a blood test but I don’t want to be blackmailed … I’d prefer to do it out of goodwill.”

  Böstrom told the Guardian subsequently: “I was a kind of middleman – calling her, calling Julian. It went on for hours.” Late on the Friday afternoon, Assange finally agreed to take a test. But it was too late. The clinics had closed for the weekend. Braun phoned Böstrom to say that they have been to the police, who say they cannot simply tell Assange to take a test. The police insist that their statements must be passed to the duty prosecutor, and a call was put out for the arrest of an accused foreigner, Julian Assange.

  That night, the story about the allegations made against the man behind WikiLeaks leaked to the Swedish tabloid newspaper Expressen. Who leaked it? We don’t know. The prosecutor, who later got into trouble for confirming the allegation, says it was put to her by the newspaper, which had apparently been tipped off.

  As a result of this hectic Friday, when the following morning dawned, Saturday 21 August, allegations that Assange was wanted by police for “rape” had begun to be sprayed all over the world. In the electronic global village, anyone can become famous within 15 minutes. Assange was in an unexpected predicament and his conviction that he had not “raped” anyone is perhaps understandable. But Assange’s new status as an international celebrity, as “the world’s most famous man”, was proving to be a cruelly double-edged sword. Journalists were demanding a reaction.

  At 9.15am, he tweeted under the WikiLeaks name: “We were warned to expect ‘dirty tricks’. Now we have the first one.” The following morning, he tweeted: “Reminder: US intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks as far back as 2008.” In an interview, the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet asked if he had had sex with his two accusers. He replied: “Their identities have been made anonymous so even I have no idea who they are.” He added: “We have been warned that the Pentagon, for example, is thinking of deploying dirty tricks to ruin us.” Yet Assange must have realised which two women had been threatening to report him to the police.

  This line of attack proved unwise. He must have known his statements were, at best, highly misleading. His conspiracy theory of a Pentagon “honeytrap” gave a hostage to fortune and it also appears to have infuriated the two women. The Assange interview in Aftonbladet was published on 22 August. When it appeared, Weiss’s friend Maria told police, “Katrin was upset by the fuss, and very angry with Julian.” Sonja, too, seemed exasperated, telling Aftonbladet: “The charges are of course not orchestrated either by the Pentagon or anyone else. The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who has a warped attitude to women, and a problem with taking ‘no’ for an answer.” She added: “He is not violent and I do not feel threatened by him.”

  It took four months of stonewalling before Assange would accept in public that there was no evidence of a “honeytrap”. His lawyer, Mark Stephens, who had been using the phrase, had been misquoted, Assange would finally explain to the BBC’s Today programme on 21 December, and “that type of classic Russian, Moscow thing … is not probable”. While still claiming that “powerful interests” could have pushed along the smears, he did at last concede: “That doesn’t mean they got in there at the very beginning and fabricated them.”

  What appeared to be Plan B came next: depict the women’s complaints as driven, if not by the CIA, then at least by a fit of man-hating. Once ensconced back in London, Assange spoke dolefully to contacts about the strong approach Swedish officialdom took to sex allegations: “Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of fundamentalist feminism,” he complained to friends. “One of the women has written many articles on taking revenge against men for infidelity, and is a notorious radical feminist,” he told the London Times. His lawyers stirred into this conspiracy mix some unsubstantiated hints of financial greed: “Text messages from them … speak of revenge and of the opport
unity to make lots of money.”

  Assange’s money allegations link significantly to the contents of one official witness statement from Weiss’s friend Maria, which may offer a more innocent explanation: “She remembered them talking about going to [the rival tabloid] Expressen, because Julian had spoken to Aftonbladet himself. But this was just something they said, and had no intention of doing. Maria said Katrin had been contacted by an American newspaper and they had joked that she should get well paid.” None of them ever did, apparently, sell their story to anyone. In any case, these conversations came after the women had already been to the police.

  Assange then shifted to what appeared to be Plan C. This was to characterise the complaining women as feather-brained types who “got into a tizzy” and were “bamboozled”: “The suggestion is they went to the police for advice and they did not want to make a complaint. What they say is that they found out they were mutual lovers of mine, and they had unprotected sex, and they got into a tizzy about whether there was a possibility of sexually transmitted diseases, and they went to the police to have a test … A ridiculous thing to go to the police about,” he told Today. “One of the witnesses, one of the friends of one of those women, she says that one of the women states that she was bamboozled into this by police and others. These women may be victims in this process.”

  Swedish prosecutors were later to be criticised for a clumsy, or even sinister, handling of the case. A duty prosecutor ordered an arrest that same Friday night. Over the weekend, senior prosecutor Eva Finne, in Stockholm, withdrew the “rape” accusations involving both women, to be replaced on 24 August with an investigation into a less serious and non-arrestable charge equivalent to “sexual harassment”, confined solely to the case of Sonja Braun. On 30 August, therefore, 10 days after the storm broke, Assange voluntarily turned up for a formal interview with the police, to relive his short and ultimately calamitous spell as Braun’s house-guest.